Senior Software Engineer

Made Tech is on a mission to use technology to improve society - for everyone. We help public sector organisations transform, deliver and manage world-class digital products and cloud services. We work with the UK government to modernise legacy technology and shape the digital future of the country. We support local government teams in building accessible services that make a real difference to people. And we help the NHS use technology to improve and save lives. Made Tech has grown quickly, and has bold ambitions for the future. We know that growth and change can be unsettling (as well as exciting), so we are looking for people who enjoy this challenge, and want to help others thrive too.

About the role

Are you a Software Engineer that wants to actually see the real-world impact from what you help to create? Our mission is simple! We believe we can use tech to make public services better. We also believe this can happen best when our own team represents the society that actually uses the services we work on. At Made Tech, we’re collectively continuing to grow a culture that is happy, healthy, safe and inspiring for people of all backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage all people from underrepresented groups to apply for roles with us.

What does the job entail?

We primarily write and deliver custom software for the public sector. We work across central and local government, as well as in health, and our past lies in the technology startup world. Technical excellence for us isn’t about delivering to feature lists. We place a strong emphasis on outcome-based delivery; ensuring our customer’s goals are understood and achieved with the technology we deploy. Senior Software Engineers find themselves working on a variety of different problems from monoliths to microservices, upskilling colleagues and customers, always finding themselves learning from others, while constantly striving to be nice humans 🙂

Our teams have used Java, Ruby, Python, ES6 with React, as well as C# with .NET Core. We don’t limit ourselves as a company and we expect all our Engineers to be keen on learning new technologies. Automation is important to our teams, so we make sure there is a CD pipeline set up to build, test, and release many times per day.

High performing software delivery teams need to be empowered to iteratively and rapidly deliver changes all the way through to production. To do this we combine our extensive cloud automation knowledge with DevOps culture. We ensure we document our architecture and infrastructure as code, using technologies such as Terraform and OpenAPI. Containerisation is a big part of empowering our teams to develop, deploy and scale their applications, but so too is using AWS Lambda and avoiding the complexity of stateful services altogether. Right tool for the job.

For us, DevOps is about culture rather than roles and titles. Even though this role is for someone with strong DevOps experience, the biggest impact you will have is coaching and helping teams use the platforms you build. You won't be building infrastructure in isolation or charged with deploying other peoples work into production. You'll empower teams with the mantra: you build it, you run it!

We grow a team of language agnostic engineers, which you might already consider yourself to be, who are versed in a mix of paradigms such as object-oriented, functional, declarative, event-based and aspect-oriented. To create this environment our Senior Software Engineers need to embrace sharing their knowledge and skills with others, and they need to keep an open mind – we’d love to hear some examples of mentoring, coaching and growing team members. Maybe you will have written some blog posts about your discipline, or perhaps even delivered a talk or two.

What experience are we looking for?

• Written code with tests
• Delivery in an agile environment
• Worked across a variety of programming languages
• Worked with at least one Cloud platform
• Worked with databases
• Worked with APIs
• Debugging experience in a range of systems
• Evidence of self-development – we value keen learners
• Drive to deliver outcomes for users
• Desire to mentor others

Nice to Haves

• Consultancy experience
• Working directly with customers and users
• Working within multidisciplinary teams with product, design, and technology working within the same cycles
• Showcasing and presentation skills
• Agile practices such as Scrum, XP, and/or Kanban
• Pair programming – we pair around 50% of the time
• Writing code with test-driven development
• Component-based design techniques such as using pattern libraries, styled-components, CSS-in-JS, BEM, and/or SUIT CSS
• Debugging infrastructure
• Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
• The React ecosystem including a test-driven approach
• Infrastructure as code technology like Terraform and Cloud Formation
• Familiarity with architectural and design patterns
• Use of architectural decision records

Benefits at Made Tech and Application Support

Support in applying. If you need this job description in another format, or other support in applying, please email talent@madetech.com. We believe we can use tech to make public services better. We also believe this can happen best when our own team represents the society that actually uses the services we work on. We’re collectively continuing to grow a culture that is happy, healthy, safe and inspiring for people of all backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply for roles with us.

When you apply, we’ll put you in touch with a talent partner who can help with any needs or adjustments we may need to make to help with your application. This includes alternative formats for documents, the time allotted for interviews and any other needs. We also welcome any feedback on how we can improve the experience for future candidates.

Life at Made Tech

We’re committed to building a happy, inclusive and diverse workforce. You can get a sense of what it’s like working here from our blog, where we talk about mental health, communities of practice and neurodiversity (as well as our client work and best practice). Like many organisations, we use Slack to chat to each other. The Slack groups that have formed give an idea of the diversity within Made Tech. If you’d like to speak to someone from one of these groups about their experience as an employee, let your recruitment agent or Made Tech Talent Specialist know.

The groups are:

• antiracist-activists
• disability
• lgbtqiaplus-allies-and-activists
• neurodiversity
• parents-carers
• women-in-tech

Benefits

We are always listening to our growing teams and evolving the benefits available to our people. As we scale, as do our benefits and we are scaling quickly. We've recently introduced a flexible benefit platform which includes a Smart Tech scheme, Cycle to work scheme, and an individual benefits allowance which you can invest in a Health care cash plan or Pension plan. We’re also big on connection and have an optional social and wellbeing calendar of events for all employees to join should they choose to.

Here are some of our most popular benefits listed below:

• 30 days Holiday - we offer 30 days of paid annual leave
• Flexible Working Hours - we are flexible with what hours you work
• Flexible Parental Leave - we offer flexible parental leave options
• Remote Working - we offer part time remote working for all our staff
• Paid counselling - we offer paid counselling as well as financial and legal advice

An increasing number of our customers are specifying a minimum of SC (security check) clearance in order to work on their projects. As a result, we're looking for all successful candidates for this role to have eligibility. Eligibility for SC requires 5 years' continuous UK residency and 5 year' employment history (or back to full-time education). Please note that if at any point during the interview process it is apparent that you may not be eligible for SC, we won't be able to progress your application and we will contact you to let you know why.